


The Residuum

by Rend_Herring



Series: At the Interim [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Anchors, Angst and Romance, Beholding, Canon Divergence, Comfort/Angst, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, Grief/Mourning, I began writing this before jonny started dropping his sick prose, In that Jon's narrative fixates a lot on Martin to keep himself steadied, Introspection, Jon's childhood, M/M, Martin is Entity Bait, Martin's Childhood, Minor Injuries, POV Jonathan Sims, POV Third Person Limited, Tenderness, They Fight A Creature, They Had It Rough lads, apocalypse setting, finding hope, the enduring nature of love, they are coping, they are stressed out at times because World Sucks Now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:48:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24060847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rend_Herring/pseuds/Rend_Herring
Summary: The world is dead,  everything might be horrible forever, but this—Martin, and his helpless sighs, and the ramifications of loving him—this is Jon’s.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Series: At the Interim [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1735768
Comments: 33
Kudos: 384





	The Residuum

**GET READY FOR MY DISCLAIMERS!!! **

-I began the bulk writing process after the season 5 trailer dropped, so this setting and it's rules do not precisely follow the canon rules and setting. 

-I went ahead and consolidated this story into a series with my first TMA story, A Measure Outside The Lines, because as I wrote it, I realised I was still following the voices, characterisations, and headcanons established therein. SO! This obviously is what happens after the events of AMOTL and that eensy tiny universe.

-This story was written with an intended resolution for the overarcing plot. I wrote it in a sort of "snapshot" format, as Jon and Martin make their journey into the heart of the apocalypse. I am leaving the series open for a final resolution if that's something I feel inspired to write, but this can DEFINITELY be read as a one-off with no real fretting that you might be juming into bed with a WIP.

\- Lads I don't know WHAT HAPPENED, quarantine has me writing with a lot of distractions so if this narrative seems disjointed I'm just going to be like, "Ah yes, I intended it that way," even though that's basically a lie. But if I fool around in this doc literally one more hour to make it more cohesive and tonally what I wanted, I'm going CRY like a BABY please just TAKE THIS from my terrible HANDS. I'm sorry. I'm 99.9% certain this is (jean ralphio voice) _Unnnnrreeaaaddabbllee!!_

*DISCLAIMERS OVER*

Also huge thank you to [Everchased](https://everchased.tumblr.com/) for letting me use their Martin and Jon's likeness, and inspiring part of this with [their art](https://everchased.tumblr.com/post/188943364622/apocalypse-boyfriends-on-the-run-from-well)... [more than once.](https://everchased.tumblr.com/post/190285085092/im-just-saying-man-if-i-hear-one-dear-or).

\--------

_“What beast would gift me this body and name itself God / what borrowed rib and rain / what stories / what ownership of that which grows / in another_ ” –Jihyun Yun

\----

  
  


—-

It is a painful thing, to end the world.

First, come the words that are not Jon’s own, being ripped from his tongue. One after another, his jaw cracking open and giving shape to each poisonous syllable. There is power in words, Jon knows this better than most people, but not like  _ this _ —they shouldn’t be able to cleave through the tissue of reality and let crawl through a hoard of nightmares. No single being is meant to harness this much power, Jon thinks, as his mind struggles not to be separated from the rest of him. He wants to be small again, wants to be held down to the earth at all four corners— but he’s burning and breaking and suffocating, he’s being cast into cold darkness and falling into thin air, he’s being twisted in every direction, consumed, and he’s pinned down, ensnared—enduring it all. 

The world is large, so full and afraid, and Jon is immense when he isn’t meant to be.

_ Martin. _

Jon tries calling out for him—throws the word desperately into the cacophony of fear, only it never emerges as sound. It’s locked inside, and the rest of Jon is locked inside with it. He can’t remember having a voice of his own right now, but at least he remembers Martin’s name, and clutches on to the radiant knowledge of it. Martin will come for him, he’ll make it home, he  _ will.  _

He can’t already be dead. Jon is certain of that. Jon would have  _ felt it.  _

Then: Nothing—like a fuse that has taken on a surge of power and has finally blown. A great maw of emptiness opens inside him, and he is being dragged down into it. There’s no real oblivion to be found here however, Jon has touched the End before, so it isn’t that. No, this is far simpler.

_I’m passing out,_ Jon thinks deliriously, relieved that the limits of his physical self have finally been tapped and his body is shutting itself down in defence. It’s comforting to still _have_ a limit. 

But there is one part of Jon—one ragged, fragile sliver—that hopes he won’t wake up and have to face this new world.

He doesn’t even feel it when his body drops. 

When any awareness restores itself he has already lost time. He doesn’t remember waking up, he doesn’t remember Martin coming home. Jon can’t remember how they got to the window, or why he’s laughing.

Only it’s not a laugh anymore as it twists into broken sobs, and when the fear and pain come pouring into Jon’s mind in an open channel, the sobs morph into a scream. It sounds  _ all wrong _ —as if thousands of screams are being issued in thousands of different registers, all from one mouth. Jon knows Martin is wincing and clapping his hands over his ears, even if Jon can’t exactly  _ see  _ it.

_ “Jon!”  _ Martin cries out above the din, _ “ _ Please, you need to—” his voice cuts off into a pained hiss. Martin drops to his knees, the hands over his ears balling into fists. 

This is what forces Jon to find a way to stop it happening, knowing it’s hurting Martin is enough to will himself toward silence until all that’s left is his own voice—his own pitiful whimpers as he collapses, exhausted, back onto the floor.

“What do I do,” Martin says immediately, crawling over to him, fingers frantic and petting at Jon’s shoulders, “where are you—where does it hurt?”

“Everywhere,” Jon says, miserable. “It’s everywhere.” The overlap of physically seeing feeding over the inundation of Knowing is too much. He can’t narrow himself down to this one spot. Everything within him is compelled to Watch even if it hurts. Even if it means being torn in a billion different directions, and Jon can’t close his eyes against it as it pours through him in a violent current. 

Martin begins pulling Jon into his arms.  _ Not safe,  _ Jon thinks, he can’t control himself in this state, doesn’t know what he might do.

It doesn’t matter. 

He goes to Martin, desperate for the solid comfort Jon knows he’ll find there. Even if Jon can’t mark himself in the universe, he knows exactly where he is relative to Martin. It’s strange. Jon has never been more of a monster than he is at this moment, but he’s also never felt so utterly human. He feels sick, and afraid, he hurts and just wants to be held.

“Try closing your eyes, Jon,” Martin murmurs, his lips soft against Jon’s temple. “It might help.”

“I  _ can’t.  _ It doesn’t want me to.” 

Something broad and warm crosses over Jon’s forehead, then over his eyes. Everything goes dark, and that—that’s actually a little better. Martin’s palm is soft where it presses down over Jon’s eyelids. After several minutes of silence, of Martin gently rocking Jon until his breathing begins to stabilise, his mind begins to slow and untangle. Thoughts start to feel more ordered. It’s still painfully overwhelming, but a glimmer of focus is better than the uninterrupted telepathic flow of moments ago.

“It’s going to be okay,” Martin whispers unsteadily. “It’s going to be okay,” this time with more conviction. Martin isn’t a true optimist, his brand of hope has the sort of determined practicality that comes from a lifetime of evolving around adversity. Jon wishes he could hold Martin’s certainty in his own chest, let it fill him with faith that this can be undone. He wants so much more than to bear witness to a ruined world he helped create.

Jon shudders in Martin’s arms. The tape recorder lies overturned in the corner of the room, its static discharging in a ceaseless stream.

—-

  
  


Martin is coming to knock on the bedroom door. 

It hasn’t happened yet, but Jon draws the pillow over his head in anticipation anyway. 

He’s pausing right outside now. Jon follows that tug in his mind that never stops fixating on Martin—he’s taking a deep breath, shifting his weight from one foot, to the other. There it is—a faint rap, and Jon’s name muffled through the barrier of the door.

“No,” Jon calls back. 

The door flies open, the handle bouncing back against the wall, and Jon jumps up in bed. “Christ, Martin, you—”

“Morning!” Martin says, marching into the room and throwing open the curtains.

Jon groans and flops backward, tries getting the pillow back over his head, but Martin wrenches it away and tosses it aside. “Oh no you don’t—we’re not doing  _ that  _ anymore. Come on, Jon.”

Two daypacks are clutched under his arm. Their straps droop toward the floor.

Jon gestures toward them. “What are those for?” he asks, voice rough with disuse. He already knows the answer. It isn’t the first time they’ve had the argument that’s about to happen. The first time Martin brought up leaving, it had been a gentle suggestion, something to seed into Jon’s mind for later. The second time he brought out a list of reasons detailing why leaving was better than staying put—but Jon hadn’t been ready to hear it. No amount of sense could dissuade him. Now, it appears, Martin is simply going to take charge of the situation and make the decision himself because it’s clear that Jon  _ can’t. _

It’s an aggravating thing to know about himself—how fear and grief and guilt cripple forward motion when Jon has too much time to think. 

“You need to pack a bag,” Martin says, tossing one onto the bed, and slinging the other into the corner of the room where they’ve been folding and piling clothes.

“Martin,” Jon groans, “nowhere is safe. At least here we can—” 

“Wait to die?” Martin finishes, cheerfully sardonic. Jon doesn’t want to say yes. Martin nods anyways. “Have you had any luck finding the others?”

“It’s not that simple,” Jon grouses, hands picking awkwardly at the sheets. “I can’t find them the way I can find you—not yet at least.”

“Right, my point exactly. Can’t find them from here, so let’s try another way—clothes you can travel in, torches and batteries are in the cupboard, matchsticks. I’ve already gathered what I can from the pantry, might turn out we need it after all. Daisy had a lot of...sharp things in the shed, I’ve got those too. We’re leaving at dawn.”

“There _ is  _ no dawn.”

Martin shrugs. 

“There’s nothing left out there!” Jon half-shouts. “By the time we find them, they’ll probably be—” He can’t bring himself to say it out loud. 

Martin’s mouth thins into a line. He looks down, says quietly to the floor, “I don’t believe that. And I don’t think you do either. Now come on, get up.”

Jon huffs, begins pulling at the duvet to shield himself from the way the light is all  _ wrong _ in the way it refracts through the window—too washed out, the grey-yellow of an always decaying twilight. “I’m not ready.”

“I’m not either. We’re still going.”

“I said I’m not—”

Martin slams his palms down against the wall then whirls around, his hands balling into fists against his forehead, then releasing to scrub once over his face. “We don’t get to do this anymore, Jon! You don’t get to give up, and you  _ don’t _ get to shut me out, because that’s exactly where you’re headed like this.”

“You would know, wouldn’t you,” Jon snaps, immediately hating himself for it. It isn’t even  _ true _ . Jon has never once seen Martin close to admitting defeat. Frustratingly, Jon doesn’t know if the thought of it ever  _ occurs _ to him. Even when Martin is  _ self-destructing _ it is an act of defiance.

Jon still can’t keep from bringing it up. Hates that he still feels an ugly jealousy against the Lonely for having touched Martin, made worse by knowing it’s only partially Jon’s own insecurity nurturing that grudge. Jon is angry, and he’s angry at Martin for being angry. But where Jon’s anger and fear are so reticulated that it threatens paralysis, Martin becomes calmer. Anger becomes motivation. Fear becomes resolve. How is it that Martin can still think to function, and plan, and  _ hope, _ when Jon can barely move from this spot on the bed? It isn’t fair. 

“That’s not going to work,” Martin says, voice even again, eyes flashing with a spark of hurt before Jon can open his mouth to take it all back. He inhales deeply, eyes closing. Jon watches him summon patience from that wellspring he reserves exclusively for moments like this. It only makes Jon more upset. He doesn’t want Martin’s patience right now. He doesn’t want Martin to stand there and find something worth believing in—because then Jon might start to believe it, too. And if he starts to believe it, then there might be room left for  _ possibilities _ as well, and that… that’s more terrifying than what’s outside those doors.

Such infectious things, dreams are. Paradoxically fragile, but inviolable in the way they seed into a mind—yet another thing you can lose, another vulnerable, precious thing, that can be ripped out from between your fingers. It’s easier to be broken. It’s easier to keep swallowing the suffering in great mouthfuls. Haven’t they lost enough?

“I’m  _ sorry _ that the world has ended. I hate that you have to feel it. I’d do anything if it meant—” his eyes telegraph intense distress where they track over Jon’s face. He doesn’t finish the sentence. “But we’re not going to stay in this cottage and do nothing while I watch you lie there, hating yourself, until you finally decide it’s easier to just  _ turn it off.  _ And what would happen to me, then? Hm?” Martin’s voice wobbles dangerously, “You’d leave me alone?”

“Never,” Jon says immediately, then shuts his mouth. Opens it. Blinks down at his hands. “I don’t—when I think about— _ ”  _ He exhales a frustrated sigh, doesn’t know how it is that entire statements can unwind off the tip of his tongue in piercing detail, but his own words lack such precision. “You’re all I have left,” he finishes lamely. 

“Jon,” Martin murmurs, his voice soft and pleading again, “Can’t you see that we’re afraid of the same things? But it doesn’t matter out there, or in here—nowhere will be safe. At least if we’re moving, we can go toward something, and that’s better than giving up. Jon… we need to let this place go. Look at what it’s doing to us.” 

They stare at each other, Martin’s eyes have that watery sheen to them, the one he gets when he’s frustrated or overwhelmed and trying not to cry. He looks so tired—hair sticking up at odd ends, no longer clean-shaven. His shirt is wrinkled at the elbows and tails. Jon has seen this version of Martin in all its iterations. Some of those images are Jon’s own, glimpses he’s caught of Martin at his desk looking dishevelled and exhausted—but there are other memories too. Ones that don’t belong to Jon, ones that he never asked for but nevertheless has had pushed into his mind:

No more than nine, Martin’s hands shaking from fatigue, sorting medicine into an organiser. He looks so small, hasn’t yet found the growth spurt that will pull his bones long in the night and wake him up with sharp pains. The hob’s hood light beams it’s stale, yellow light across the medicine labels, making Martin squint to read them. 

Eleven—he’s slipping compression socks onto his mother’s feet while she stares down at him with mean eyes, complaining, always angry with him. He’s always failing at something. Martin’s face is expressionless, his mind detached from the rest of him, and then Jon can’t hear what she’s saying because Martin has shut it so far away that not even the Eye can bear it into focus anymore.

That terrible night with Martin curled in on his side where he allowed all his anger and grief to come bubbling to the surface, and how he wished his mother’s fate would reach its inevitable conclusion. How tired he was of having love ripped from him in loads, and never receiving any in return. How unfair it was. All the unkind thoughts Martin had in those moments, and how ashamed he’d been of it in the light of day.

Fifteen and locked into his room, pouring over bills with maths that don’t add up. NHS forms covered in Martin’s tidy handwriting strewn across a desk. The claustrophobia that started here, in this very room, so long ago—cramped between those four walls, buried underneath the weight of responsibilities far bigger than himself. 

_ “Haven’t you had enough?”  _ she asks him once, only once, as Martin picks her up from the floor. Her skin is brittle where it maps over her knuckles, and Martin doesn’t miss the way she shirks his touch as much as possible—making the process of moving her back into bed harder, more painful. What’s the point in giving up, he thinks, despair never served him, why should he allow it room to grow? Everything is always happening and doesn’t stop, it doesn’t slow down, not ever.

The morning in the sitting room when Martin is twenty-one years old. She pushes her breakfast plate onto the floor, the bits of powdered egg and toast burnt at the crusts scattering across the lino, and Martin just—he  _ snaps  _ like a matchstick bent under a thumb. He’s yelling and crying, but her face never changes. She watches him with the same malignant gaze that Martin will still feel burrowing down under his skin long after she’s gone. He’s pleading with her, begging for answers, and, “ _ What do you want from me?”  _ he’s asking,  _ “What’s left that I haven’t already given to you?”  _ He’s let go of it all—a childhood, relationships, opportunities, a future beyond the chippy on Ashton where he comes home every night smelling of oil and salt, with a cheque that barely covers their rent.

Abruptly, he calms himself, sniffing and rubbing away those angry tears with the back of his hand. He laughs—that thin, mirthless laugh that Jon has had turned on him before and makes you feel stretched, the fragility of an ego exposed as if it’s Martin who can see everything and not the other way around. In this moment he sees his mother for precisely the person she is—and it isn’t that she is inherently cruel, or hateful, or incapable of feeling because so few humans are truly that empty. It was that love, for her, was just too hard. It required too much risk, or time, or attention, too much energy, too little joy. Surrendering to resentment and spite was easier, felt better, than doing the hard work it takes to heal a heart, and her son was a casualty of that defeat.

For Martin, the world has always been falling apart. The world  _ actually  _ ending in the very literal sense, has done little to dim that inexorable core of determination that Martin carries around in the middle of him as if it’s some ordinary quirk of personality.

He’s the brightest thing in the entire universe. 

Jon could pick him instantly out of the crush of a billion souls, and would do if ever needed. 

Jon’s gaze finally flicks down to Martin’s hands. Steady. No clench to his fists anymore, or the nervous dithering of fingers as it was when this all began. Watching his stillness is a bit unsettling, it means Martin has already bypassed his own abject horror, switched over into acceptance, and has now found a way to live like this. Martin adapts too easily to fear. He’s too accustomed to forcing sense out of chaos, as everything around him falls to bits.

It makes Jon’s stomach clench.

Jon silently reaches for the empty daypack at the end of the bed and draws it into his palms. 

Martin’s expression falters and he sits on the edge of the bed, hunches over with his elbows digging into the tops of his thighs and his forehead propped against his wrists. “I shouldn’t have yelled—I’m just worried and—I don’t do well like this.” He shakes his head at the ground, laughs ruefully, and fumbles a hand backward, blindly reaching. Jon scrambles toward him, ducking underneath the arm completely to come around to Martin’s front, settling across his lap. “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what you need, or if I’m hurting you. I’m just… I’m scared too. I don’t have the answers either, don’t even know if there are any answers left. I want to give you space to grieve, but I feel like if I give you too much, you might disappear right in front of me, or, or maybe I’ll be the one who—and—I can’t. I can’t do that again. I just can’t.” His voice lilts high and raspy at the end.

Jon lifts his head from Martin’s shoulder in a rush, he can’t hear this—can’t bear the way Martin’s body shudders a little, like he’s physically holding back a wall of painful memories from overcoming him. Jon holds Martin’s face in his hands, kisses the freckle below his left eye, the soft curve of his mouth, pushes his fingers into Martin’s hair.

Martin kisses him back, soft, undemanding. His fingertips bump over the knobs of Jon’s spine.

“You’re trying to change the subject,” Martin says, but there’s more air in his voice now than a minute ago. Jon spreads kisses down the line of Martin’s throat, feels the ricochet of a pulse against his tongue. Martin’s hands tighten when they’ve settled on Jon’s hips, and Jon feels a small fizzle of pride well up in his chest. It’s brilliant that this hasn’t changed. The world is dead, everything might be horrible forever, but  _ this _ —Martin, and his helpless sighs, and the ramifications of loving him—this is Jon’s. 

—-

Nothing has prepared Jon to look at the rows of burned bodies in the culvert, lying side by side. A wedding ring glints in the sun, hangs loose from a skeletal finger. A skull twists open in a hollow scream. He fights the urge to gag, blinks stupidly. There’s no buffer of words here, no distance at all between this experience, and the madness laid before him. This isn’t someone else’s memory being pushed into his mind.

It occurs to Jon, that despite everything, he hasn’t actually seen firsthand a tremendous amount of corpses that were actually corpses—and not a  _ thing  _ wearing the skin of a dead person. There hadn’t even been an open casket after his mother passed. It was something Jon had decided to be rather incensed over as he grew into adulthood. Perhaps it would have afforded him some kind of closure as a child, made him feel less like he’d been abandoned.

Jon never really knew his father in any meaningful way—aside from the fact that his grandmother loved him, and somehow this meant Jon wasn’t welcome to ask questions about that. Her grief closed in around her memories, and excluded Jon. The first time she accidentally called Jon _ ‘Hassan’ _ , he hadn’t even known whose name it was.

His mother though—Jon remembers her.

She had been laid to rest in a cemetery in Christchurch, back when graves were graves, and he hadn’t yet learned to be afraid of what gnashing teeth might be lurking below creation. He remembers the burial, standing along the upturned earth, the smell of damp heavy in his nostrils— how the loose dirt bunched around the toes of his shoes. 

He remembers the midday light burning the nape of his neck, and how later his memory would turn this into a great cruelty. It seemed so thoughtless and unfair that the sun would illuminate this new reality in such excruciating detail: 

Jon’s shadow stretched over her headstone, the heat vapours distorting the edges. 

A damselfly perched on a tattered fabric rose, just beyond. 

The sharp line of a shadow where a tree branch bisected the grass and dirt.

Quietly, within the earth, or strewn into the vastness, she had disappeared. And Jon was alone.

He had only been four when it happened, not quite old enough at the time to comprehend the permanence of death. He remembers, vaguely, her voice softly calling his name, the sound of her laugh, what it felt like to be loved by her—and how it felt as if the world had ended when Jon finally understood she was never coming back. Growing up has robbed him of the shape of his mother’s face in his mind, but Jon can still feel the sharpness of grief when he thinks about her.

Afterward, his grandmother had discarded all of his mother’s belongings, emptying each room until only dust remained on the window sills. The bare walls made Jon ache. He watched his grandmother box up bits and bobs, his mother’s paintings, her collection of tea cups, and sent them away to charity—all except a cream coloured vase, sealed at the top, which she carefully held in her lap all the way back to the bungalow on Cranleigh Road.

She placed the capsule within the display cabinet, locked behind the glass alongside the bone china and silverware. Jon wasn’t supposed to go near that cabinet, she was very strict about this rule, which was of course how Jon ended up climbing it for a better look at whatever it was he wasn’t supposed to be touching. It was there that he’d pried open the urn, looked inside, and found the ash. He wouldn’t know what—or who—it was until years later, and almost dropped the whole damn thing when his grandmother walked in and promptly began screaming. She’d been so  _ angry.  _ His mother had never yelled at him that way, and it scared Jon badly enough that he did as he was told, even if he didn’t understand why. It took an embarrassingly long time for him to understand that it had been his father’s ashes, and even longer to sort out how he felt about that. 

He wouldn’t come into contact with human ash again until years later. It would arrive encapsulated in a glass jar, clutched in Martin’s hands, and passed on to Jon as a token of reassurance. Jane Prentiss might not have been completely human there at the end of course, but bone is bone, and ash is ash, and in the end it’s all inert pieces of carbon. He knows he felt  _ something _ when looking down into that jar, but it’s hard to specify if it had been sadness, or fear, or relief— lost as he was at that time to his own paranoia.

It was easier, before, holding in and ignoring that tug in his chest when confronted with the evidence of what was once a life.

Perhaps it was a kindness, Jon thinks now, not to have seen his mother in death, and to be left with that image as his last memory of her. You would think with the spark of life gone, that the body itself would seem smaller somehow, but it isn’t. There is so much emptiness left behind. There is such a massive vacancy that occurs when a body stops being home, and starts being husk.

“Desolation?” Martin asks, swallowing hard.

“No,” Jon says, lowering the strip of torn cloth back down over his eyes and Looking past it. “Humans did this.” They had not burned long, or hotly enough to cause complete disintegration. Most were only burnt well enough to eliminate disease. It might have been done to stop an outbreak of the Corruption, but it doesn’t matter. Perhaps it was just plain human violence, it all runs together these days. Jon doesn’t want to Know, and pushes away at the knowledge.

The skulls still stare at Jon with their empty sockets, their outstretched hands.

“We should keep moving,” Martin says, stands stoically along the culvert filled with the dead. He adjusts the satchel strapped to his back, looks up at the ruined sky. “We need to find a safe place to set camp for now.” 

He’s right, Martin is beginning to tire, his pace slowing. Jon has no idea how long they’ve been walking, time feels different nowadays. The demand for rest isn’t as frequent as it was when the world was still the world, and sleep does not guarantee reprieve, but Martin needs that energy because they might not receive much warning before needing to run. It isn’t just the obvious obstacles to take into consideration, or the actual monsters, but also the paranoid and violently predisposed humans left after the Change—when all sense of law and social contract has been dismantled. The collapse of civilisation was sudden, chaotic, and complete. 

One gloved hand brushes over Jon’s shoulder, squeezing briefly. “Come on,” Martin says, voice gentle. It’s a quick, grounding force, and Jon hadn’t realised his mind was beginning to spin out too far ahead. Martin opens an abandoned vehicle, and begins searching for anything that might eventually be useful. There’s blood across the rear window, a handprint smeared. The images of someone’s final, brutal moments unfold themselves into clarity, making Jon choke on the perpetual lump that has lodged itself in his trachea since this all began. Nowhere is safe to look. Every direction holds another nightmarish scene Jon’s mind unhelpfully reveals.

Behind them, far away, someone is screaming. Someone is always screaming.

—-

  
  


In an effort to avoid areas that might have higher population concentrations, they find themselves climbing over a drystack wall and into a dale. It’s a cattle pasture, going by the dilapidated hay bales, and watering tubs scattered aimlessly throughout the field. But after an hour of crossing land, all they find are quite a lot of deep, ominous slash marks that have pulled up grass and dirt, and not a single bovine. 

Martin stops abruptly, and Jon nearly runs into his back. 

Pushing the strip of cloth out of his eyes, Jon looks down to see Martin crouching and examining the earth. “This isn’t the time to investigate,” Jon says anxiously, looking around the pasture. The openness of the space provides them no cover if whatever left the earth so torn is still roaming around here somewhere.

Martin’s fingers are spread, trying to fit them to match the pattern of claw marks. Even with the considerable width of Martin’s hand, he doesn’t even come close to corresponding. He glances back up at Jon, mouth stretching into a funny little grimace. “Jon,” he says, very serious about it, “I’m starting to think cows didn’t make these tracks."

Jon lets out a small laugh. It’s a pitiful, croaky thing, but the sound of it makes Martin beam and Jon can’t find it within himself to still be cross that they’re wasting time. “Are you sure? What gave it away?” he asks, loving Martin so much that it hurts. 

“Well, not these,” Martin explains, nodding down to the gaping claw marks. “I mean, this could be hooves.”

“Or the uh, you know, antlers,” Jon supplies helpfully. “They could’ve—” Jon hooks two fingers into something vaguely horn-like, props them atop his head, and nods meaningfully toward the ground.

Martin snaps his fingers and points at Jon, “The  _ cow antlers _ , can’t forget those. Very pointy.”

“Not nice at all.”

“Exactly. So, that said, and I’m not trying to be blue but,” Martin wrinkles his nose and gestures around them, “there’s no..you know. Shit?” 

“Shit.” Jon repeats.

“You’d think there would be more of it? Should have stepped in something by now.”

Jon shifts his weight, looks around—once again feeling just how exposed they are.

“Yeah, me too,” Martin says at the look on Jon’s face. He stands and stretches, then reaches over to bracket Jon’s face with his hands. He bends and kisses Jon once, before pinching the blindfold and sliding it back into place. The sense of pressure lingers on Jon’s lips, sweet and still a little damp, and over too fast. The heels of Martin’s palms are rough where they cup the line of Jon’s jaw, fingertips stroke the skin behind Jon’s ears, keeping him anchored to Martin, rather than allowing his senses to go out ahead. “Tell me when you See it,” he murmurs, then pulls away, and Jon can hear him unsheathing the hunter’s knife they’d found in a drawer at Daisy’s cottage. 

Sometimes it’s hard to See when Jon doesn’t know what exactly he is looking for, there’s so much of  _ everything _ . There have been some narrow escapes where they’ve come away with blood on their shirts, or they’ve gone to open a door on an abandoned house, and just as they’re turning the handle Jon realises that the door isn’t  _ right _ . He’s almost tempted to open it, to find out if Helen might be on the other side and whether or not she still considers them allied in some bizarre way. But the desire to know isn’t enough when it also submits Martin to unequal risk, and a fight between Helen and Jon could get quite ugly, quite fast. They agreed Jon should use his defensive powers as little as possible. It’s not an unjustified concern. It feels different when Jon uses his powers to deliberately inflict pain, to kill, like he did Peter Lukas. It feels like another part of him has fragmented away.

Jon likes how it feels—some part of him does. And he isn’t sure if it’s the part of himself he ought to be listening to, at all.

“There’s a cottage ahead—about thirty metres or so,” Martin says, stopping again, and taking Jon by the elbow. “Dunno, it looks abandoned. Can you tell?”

Jon peeks out from under the blinder. It’s larger than the safehouse, though not by much. The weather worn paint and long grass surrounding its borders give it that pastoral melancholy sort of aesthetic. Of course Martin wants it to be safe, he loves places like this. It reminds Jon of the home they left in Achnasheen. He thinks of Martin with a pencil and loose paper, a mug of tea gone cold atop a distressed wooden desk. Martin, gazing out the window and waiting to be inspired, ink stains on his fingers that later would rub off against Jon’s own skin.

Jon could have watched him forever like that—warm, and safe, his only enemy being poor prose, and Daisy’s garden of weeds which Martin had set out to restore with the same steadfast hands that seemed so gentle when he held Jon at night. 

It makes a tight ball of sorrow well up in Jon’s chest. That’s the worst, most vicious part of all of it—having been robbed of moments. He wants years and years with Martin, he wants dozens of arguments and the forgiveness that comes after, he wants memories and taedium and comforting lapses into silence at the end of the day. Jon wants time. Even so, it’s hard not to think of himself as _ lucky, _ at least he’d been given a chance to tell Martin that he loved him. How many people were deprived of that very same moment? All the potential one human is capable of—torn down to its foundation in a minute flat. It’s unforgivable.

“Ready?” Martin says uncertainly, staring down the cottage before taking a step toward it.

Jon’s hand shoots out at the last second and grabs Martin by the back of his coat, halting him. “Wait—” something is prickling along the edge of his mind, pungent and violent, “there’s something…”

“Where?” Martin whispers, his body growing tense and alert at Jon’s side.

Coldness oozes down Jon’s spine. He turns east, pulling down the blindfold until it hangs loose against his scarf. Approximately ten metres to their left, sits a decrepit byre. The doors have been ripped off, one remains connected by a single hinge. Dozens of those claw marks are scored into the wood. Why hadn’t they thought to check it? It was right there, it was the first thing they should have seen when at the top of the hill. Why didn’t they look?

Jon slowly lifts his arm and points at it.

Martin follows his gaze. “Damn it,” he hisses, “I  _ hate _ this world. __ I hate when it does the _ brain-screwy _ bit. That’s my second  _ least  _ favourite.” 

“Wh—what’s the first?”

“Oh, well you know how I get claustropho—”

“No, I mean, you have an actual favourite? There’s a ranking system?” Jon needs to know what it is right this second.

Martin thumps him on the centre of his forehead. “Focus, Jon.” 

Jon frowns, and tries not to feel insecure.

A sound cuts through the dale—shrill and terrible, a blood curdling screech that only vaguely sounds as if it’s being issued from a set of organic lungs. At the same time, they drop to their bellies on the ground. The overgrown grass affords Jon some semblance of concealment, but Martin is still completely out in the open—his shock of dark, messy hair clearly visible above the brush. Along with his shoulders. And his arse. All of which Jon is profoundly attached to, and much prefer remain intact.

“Run for it?” Martin whispers. “We can double back, try another route.”

Running isn’t an option, it’s already beginning to pick up their scent on the wind. Even if they  _ could _ go back, it’s several more kilometres of empty land, then the forest beyond that. Martin needs sleep, and an open camp is inherently more dangerous. It would be a waste not to use the cottage, and there is only  _ one  _ of whatever that is in there. It seems fatally stupid to use these last few advantageous moments strategising over a topography that might not even exist by the time they have it underfoot.

“Stay here,” Jon whispers, hears Martin issue some frantic disagreement, before Jon is standing up and bolting toward the byre in a wild sprint. He presses himself to the exterior wall, and inches toward the opened doors. There’s a dull vibration of wood against his shoulders as Martin plasters himself alongside Jon. He looks  _ extremely _ cross. 

_What were you thinking_ he mouths at Jon, his gaze switching rapidly down at Jon, then over to the open doors. His eyes widen when he manages a glimpse of what’s inside, and Jon catches the residual image as Martin feels a surge of fear. His mind slides off the picture, the way a human brain is wont to do when they are looking at something they can’t quite understand and have no point of reference for. It’s made up of too many _bits_ at this point, there’s no telling by looking at it, what animal it might have started as. There might be some cow-adjacent odds and ends in there, but also something deer-like and human as well. It’s certainly some creature of the Flesh—it’s limbs warped, the skin not hanging quite right at all, as if too many bones were rearranged underneath, and there wasn’t enough tissue to cover it all. It’s an amalgamation of viscera and sharp edges, insatiable hunger, and only the barest blueprint of whatever creature it evolved from. They can hear the drag of hay where it’s being displaced, bones picked clean of meat clacking together under the shuffle— then a loud animalistic snort, followed by another one of those long, ear piercing shrieks. Martin startles and grabs Jon’s hand, slowly mouths _We need to run._

Jon shakes his head and holds two fingers up to his eyes, reverses them toward the byre. He isn’t sure how to get across the last part, so he holds a hand to his throat, crosses his eyes, sticks out his tongue a bit and hopes that makes it clear.

_ “WHAT!”  _ Martin whisper-shouts through clenched teeth, and Jon frantically holds a finger to shush him, but it’s too late. The monster bellows again, but it isn’t the portending cry from before, this one is rife with intent. They can hear it scratching at the ground as if it’s gearing up to charge. He can see Martin cursing himself before drawing up the knife, taking a deep breath. 

They’ve set plans for these kinds of situations, and for the eventuality that Jon would need to be the one eliminating the threat. Unlike Jon, Martin is still terribly human. His body can still make new scars, he can still bleed to death, can still be broken. That’s not to say Martin is helpless. 

Jon hasn’t met anyone as adept at underselling themselves, as Martin. He’s noticeable, and always has been, but people see what they want to see. They tend not to look past the threadbare jumpers, and compulsive tea-making, or how the north still clings to Martin’s accent no matter how much he tries to flatten it. They assume he’s naive, weak, when the reality is that Martin has never truly had the luxury of either. Jon made this mistake as well, still feels guilty over it—for the obvious reasons, but also because Martin knew it was happening and never once complained.

Martin seems to prefer underestimation, it’s enabled him being a subversive. But the past few years of constant mortal peril has made it impossible for him to hide behind any façade of meekness. The Entities have begun to catch on.

That being the case, there is still absolutely no chance of Jon allowing him into hand to hand combat with a  _ bloody monster _ with  _ claw hands _ , for christ's sake. What sort of boyfriend would he be? 

The time for staging is abruptly over when a long, blade-like talon pierces through the wood of the byre with a sharp puncturing sound, and emerges right into the space between their heads. Jon’s stomach drops into his feet when his gaze jerks toward Martin and he notices a thin trickle of blood above his temple where the claw has grazed him. Martin only seems to register it by looking at whatever horrified look is painted across Jon’s face. He touches above his eyebrow, and pulls a disgruntled expression when his fingers come away wet. 

Jon sees red. His hands clench into fists.

The monster roars from within the byre, retracting it’s talon.

The human bit of Jon is already slipping into the background, disappearing into that one last quiet place in Jon’s mind as the Archivist takes hold—an electric prickle of power building to a fever pitch. Jon walks to the open doorway, waiting. 

Within seconds, it’s there—down on all fours at first, its breath clouding out from between its jaws, and what was once nostrils. It claws at the ground, dirt and hay and bones swiping out of it’s way, before standing back on two legs at full height and letting loose a scream.

“That’s quite enough of that,” Jon says, an eerie calmness spreading through him, anaesthetising the parts of him that have the capacity to still feel fear and panic. 

It’s an indescribable rush of power—to Look into a thing and see everything it ever was, everything it might have been, every last vulnerable piece of its infinitesimal existence, and Know it into oblivion. He can feel hot, reeking breath being screamed into his face—but it’s such a trivial thing. He isn’t even afraid of the jaws snapping centimetres from him because he knows it can’t hurt him. The Archivist has it in his Sights now, and those bellows aren’t out of menace or intimidation—it’s all furious pain, and fear at the knowledge of its own unmaking. 

Distantly, Jon can hear Martin shouting. “That’s enough! Just finish it, Jon!”

But there’s a sick twist of gratification the longer the Knowing is drawn out. The expression  _ Don’t play with your food,  _ enters Jon’s mind, but Jon isn’t in control right now—the Archivist is.

Abruptly it all stops—all of the information, and the fear, the intoxicating wails of agony, everything goes silent and the Archivist feels a low anger at having been denied that final death rattle. He focuses on what is left in its place, ready to find satisfaction there instead—and Jon is immediately jerking himself out of it, clawing back into the forefront of himself—shouting in his own head  _ That’s  _ **_Martin,_ ** _ you idiot!  _ The Eye within him shutters closed in an instant.

It isn’t a pleasant experience, sort of knocks the air out of him, and Jon collapses to the ground on his hands and knees. 

“All—right—?”Martin barks, the words emerging jerky and breathless.

“Sorry,” Jon mutters, letting a wave of nausea pass over him at how close he’d nearly come to fixing himself upon Martin. “Got carried away.”

Martin doesn’t respond, and Jon looks up when he hears a wet slashing sound. He pushes his specs back onto the bridge of his nose in time to see Martin standing over the beast, one foot on either side of it’s inscrutable frame, as he brings the knife down a final time. Blood and black flecks of viscera spatters over his shirt and coat, pricks over his lenses, and Martin wrinkles his nose at the smell before he stumbles backward.

“I think you got it,” Jon says, guilt still pouring into his chest.

Martin is panting from exertion, glances over at Jon a bit desperately, and shakes his head. “What does it say about me that I find  _ that—”  _ he gestures vaguely toward Jon, “a bit...hot?”

“I—”

“Wait, nevermind, don’t answer that. I need a wash and  _ blimey _ —” he makes a gagging sound when he looks back down at the creature he just mutilated. 

“Sorry again,” Jon says, bites his lip and tries his best to look apologetic.

“Just…  _ please  _ tell me there’s not another one of these in there,” he nods up the hill toward the cottage.

The water isn’t running indoors, but fortunately there’s a well outside with a hand pump, and after staring down into a bucketful of water, Jon deems it free of Sinister Activity. 

“Oh thank  _ god,”  _ Martin sighs in relief, sets the flannel he brought from inside on top of a tree stump, and immediately starts stripping down.

“What are you—” Jon sputters, then  _ looks,  _ then sputters for other reasons. “You’re just going to—out in the open?”

“I smell rotten,” he says, brow furrowed as if Jon is the one being unreasonable for asking, “and that’s my good coat with  _ bits  _ all over it!” He indicates the heap of clothes he’s dropped to the ground, the sticky black blood soaked into the wool collar, then to his forehead where his hair is matted with his own blood.

“But can’t you do it inside,” Jon weakly protests, casting his gaze upward to the sky and the way eyes wink in and out across the horizon. 

“And you’re going to carry twenty buckets of water up the hill for that?” Jon scoffs, and the side of Martin’s mouth twitches with a smile. “You can turn around if it embarrasses you.”

“Are you always going to be this cheeky after a fight? It’s  _ your  _ modesty I’m trying to preserve here,” Jon explains, and Martin ignores it in favour of undoing his belt and the top button of his jeans. “Besides,” Jon mutters, “you know I’ll see you no matter where I’m looking,” then immediately regrets not saying  _ It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,  _ instead. Less creepy. More flirty. He’s going to get the hang of this one day, if they live that long.

“Exactly, so let me know if one of those,” he waves off toward the byre, “come round. Don’t want to be caught with my  _ knickers _ down.” His shirt goes down into the pile, and Jon fixates for a moment on the smattering of freckles across the width of his shoulders and how they run down the long furrow of Martin’s spine. 

Taking a step toward him, Jon lets his hands rest against Martin’s chest for a moment before sliding his open palms down to the zip of Martin’s jeans. There’s a quiet, but sharp inhalation of breath when Jon fingers work down the metal pull tab. Martin’s head drops down to Jon’s shoulder, a small shiver crawling through his body as Jon’s knuckles brush over the shape of him.

It’s exactly what Jon anticipated, this moment of predictable distraction, and abruptly moves to grasp the back of Martin’s neck, the other hand taking him by the jaw and manoeuvring Martin’s head to get a better look at the cut. The light is so dull anymore, colour saturation and brilliance faded into muted hues of their former selves, it’s hard to judge the depth of anything at a distance.

Martin emits a frustrated groan and tries standing upright, but Jon puts his back into it and tugs him down again by the scruff of his neck. For someone so quick to volunteer himself as caretaker, Martin is the absolute  _ worst  _ patient. He just isn’t accustomed to anyone minding him, and sometimes it takes a bit of stern insistence before Martin gives himself permission to be looked after. 

Jon used to be good at this part, he remembers that—would make a nice cocoon of soft blankets for Georgie on the sofa, bring her the heating pad and her favourite snacks when she had stitches. Always held her hair back when she caught stomach flu, and brought a few fresh cut flowers alongside the box of Setlers, so she’d have something pretty to look at from her side of the bed. 

Jon wishes Martin would let him be good at taking care of him, as well.

“That needs tending,” Jon says with a click of his tongue.

“That was cheating,” Martin counters, then laughs when Jon scratches at the stubble on his cheeks. This time Jon lets him go when he stands upright again. 

“You know I _am—_ well _,_ was—first aid certified with the BRC, right?” 

“Me too. Was a hiring mandate,” Martin says, eyes going all narrowed the way they do when he’s thinking about Elias.

“Suppose that ought to have been a clue it wasn’t a normal archiving job,” Jon murmurs, hating yet another reminder of all the red flags that went up so very early, and how, by the time Jon saw the truth of them, it was already too late. 

He turns and gives Martin at least the illusion of privacy to wash up, slides the blindfold back into place and tries looking for any immediate threats. He only gets back images of people hiding, people dying, the ground swallowing them whole, the fires rising up to claim them, the senseless violence in between. 

It’s much nicer to focus on Martin, and the way the air fogs from his mouth as he steels himself to pour a bucket of cold water over his head. He emits a small, shocked gasp as it splashes down over him, rivulets of it running between his shoulder blades, the familiar dips and swells of his body, raising gooseflesh along his arms. 

Jon tries, very hard, not to Know exactly how vulnerable Martin’s skin can be.

—-

The cottage itself is a mess. There’s no doubt that the owner met the same sad fate as the cattle they tended. The curtains are shredded, furniture torn to bits and flipped over, the window in the washroom where the old man died, is shattered—save a single shard hanging from the frame like an icicle. A trail of old, dried blood runs in a drag pattern from here, all the way to the door—another case of broken hinges. Jon picks the lock on the small utility shed and Martin sorts through it for tools to repair the door enough to open and shut. Locked doors don’t mean much anymore, but Jon has noticed Martin sleeps a little better when he feels as if he has a barrier between them and the world outside. 

“Suppose it’ll do,” Martin says, pleased enough with his work. He makes a small  _ oh  _ sound with his mouth, crouches down by a broken leg of the coffee table and begins coaxing a small spider onto a shred of fabric. “That’s it, come on then,” he says, voice soft and coaxing.

Jon narrows his eyes. “I think we should kill it,” he blurts.

Martin lets out a long-suffering sigh. “Sometimes a spider is just a spider, Jon.”

_ Not with you, they aren’t, _ Jon thinks but doesn’t say out loud. He’s seen  how the spiders scurry in the shadows, between the blades of grass on their path and watch Martin. They’re fascinated by him. The thought arrives with an ugly trickle of jealousy and paranoia that has Jon’s eyes searching every squalid corner for a cobweb to annihilate. It’s the Eye’s insecurity, more than Jon’s own. The Eye is particularly possessive of this mark—an understanding that while Martin’s versatility is universal, he has compatibilities far clearer than his resigned allegiance to the Ceaseless Watcher. The Eye knows the spiders want to whisper to Martin, and fears what might happen if Martin were to ever whisper back.

Martin disposes of the thing, and Jon immediately begins to feel calmer. 

He finds the linens while Martin searches for plasters and antibacterial—anything else that might prove useful in the future. Better to do it now and pack it away in case they need to make an abrupt departure.

Jon stands with clean sheets in his arms for too long as he stares at the spot on the bed where a man slept every night, and woke every morning to tend his herd. 

And then Jon thinks about how he has killed this man. How he didn’t deserve to die like that. Jon touches the wrinkles in the sheets, and hopes there is no one left in the world who is missing him. Jon doesn’t want them to come looking. It’s a terrible burden to know a person you loved has died in pain.

Jon misses Daisy a lot. He tries not to think about it.

It still comes in great surges. 

He misses her teasing and her bad taste in television, how she spoke with her mouth full. He misses the way she took up all the space on the sofa and left Jon to navigate the strange papasan she’d brought from her flat. He misses her calling him from the toilets just to talk when she was in there and bored, and how that didn’t strike Jon as weird, because it was just a Daisy Thing. He misses the late nights, with Basira snoring from the pull-out, while Daisy fiddled idly with his hair—forcing Jon into conversation because she knew he was starving, and she was starving too, and they needed a distraction. Even if it meant a sore scalp and removing a dozen pins out of what might have been a passing hairstyle for a school formal.

He misses the way she was the only person who understood what it’s like to be a human inside of a monster. She was really good at it. Better than Jon. 

Jon wipes his eyes, then pulls the sheets from off the bed.

He finds Martin in the washroom afterward. The mess of broken glass has been swept away, and Martin is trying to shake a plaster off his finger where it has attached there instead of his cut. Jon leans against the door frame for a moment to watch him cursing under his breath, before stepping in to intervene.

“Let me see,” Jon says, tying back his hair, and hopping up to sit on the sink bench. Martin leans back to give Jon room to settle his legs, then gets his hands under Jon’s knees to pull him closer. They’re almost eye-level now, enough so that Jon can easily tip his chin up and receive a quick kiss while Martin describes his search for the medicine cabinet.

“It’s all I could find,” he finishes, pushing a dispenser of hand sanitiser toward Jon’s thigh, along with a flannel and a half empty box of plasters. 

Jon examines the bottle of antibacterial. It’s not surgical spirit, but they don’t actually have a better option, and he pumps a glob onto the flannel. “Right. This might sting a bit,” he warns, brushing Martin’s hair off of his forehead to expose the wound. It’s not yet clotted over, even the most cursory of probes causes blood to well up. Jon remembers from personal experience that head wounds tend to bleed quite a lot because of all the superficial capillaries scattered across that patch of thin skin. Jon had tripped down the stairs at school once, landed all wrong on the third to the last step and hit his head. He recalls everyone around him panicking at how profusely he’d bled—so much so that they’d called an ambulance to transport him to hospital.

Turned out he didn’t even need stitches—just some gauze and tape, and an ice pack for good measure.

The skin around the cut is already turning a mottled violet, and Jon’s teeth clench. Carefully, he slides Martin’s eyeglasses down his nose, and sets them at a safe distance. “Here we go—” he dabs the wound with the sanitiser gel, and Martin hisses and jerks his head aside.

“Ouch!” he says, giving Jon a betrayed sort of look. “Careful!”

“I told you it was going to sting!”

“I know, but,” he uses a hand to fan the spot, “ugh.”

Jon sighs and reaches for him again. “Hold still this time,” he says, and Martin snatches his head back again. “You can fight monsters, but a bit of first aid is too scary?” 

Martin runs his hands up Jon’s sides, gazing down at him with a look of appreciation. “I  _ like  _ monsters,” he says.

“Yes,” Jon replies with a roll of his eyes, “I believe we’ve covered your inadvisable taste in partners. But unless you’re keen to transform into a horrifying  _ flesh beast _ yourself…” He raises his brows meaningfully, and Martin’s eyes go wide. One of the hands attempting to feel Jon up, darts to touch the skin around the forehead wound.

“Do you think that might happen if it gets infected?”

“No, don’t be ridiculous, it’s just a cut,” Jon says, and smiles when Martin snorts. 

He tries making quick work of it, apologising when he fashions the tip of the flannel into a point to clean a few specks of dirt that have gotten dug in a bit. Martin relaxes after a moment, allows his hands to settle on top of Jon’s legs, his thumbs draw idle circles on the insides of Jon’s thighs. It’s lovely at first, then it’s _ very  _ lovely, and then it’s  _ distracting. _

Jon clears his throat, and breathes in through his nose, reaches for the plasters and removes one from the paper wrapping, presses it gently into place. Retrieves another because the first wasn’t big enough, and sticks it on as well. 

Jon gives one last gentle to pat over the wonky X he’s made. “That ought to do it,” he announces, scratches his nails against Martin’s scalp and watches Martin’s eyes fall shut as he leans into it. 

It’s the first time in a long time that they’ve had this sort of shelter, and even though it’s a false sense of security, Jon can still feel himself being lured into it. It reminds him of their old cottage—of the quiet intimacy of a morning spent together in bed, of lazy kisses that bloomed into something more. Martin breathing roughly against Jon’s throat when fingers skirted down chests, underneath clothes. Whispered names, and the moment Jon lived for when Martin’s body would go strained and trembling, the choked sound of him muffled against Jon’s skin right before the tension broke. Then afterward—how sunlight spilling muted and diffuse through the curtains, made the drops of sweat above Martin’s brow glitter in a way that made Jon frantic with a need to brand the image into his mind forever. He looked so invincible in those moments—not strictly in the physical sense, but in his particularity and fixedness. 

It was the last beautiful thing Jon saw before the world ended. 

“It’s getting too long,” Martin murmurs as Jon tugs his hair, pulling Martin’s head aside to nose against the arc of his throat. “Starting to look rather _ Vicar of Dibley.”  _

“You look  _ good _ ,” Jon disagrees, hooking his fingers into the collar of Martin’s vest, pulling it aside to press a kiss into the hollow above his collarbone. A little shudder of sensation passes through Martin’s body, his hands twitch on the tops of Jon’s thighs. 

He laughs self-consciously. “If I’d know  _ Dawn French  _ worked on you, I would have tried it a long time—”

“Do you want to go to bed,” Jon interrupts. 

“Oh,” Martin swallows. “Y—yeah. Do  _ you  _ want to go to bed?”

Sometimes Jon has to think about it, the subtext of it, the answer tends to vary quite a lot, historically speaking. Desire flares up inconsistently before going dormant again, the hormonal flux of early days elevating Jon’s baseline. More commonly, Jon feels no particular urge one way or another to have himself off, but has enthusiastically assisted partners. The orgasm, while nice itself, is secondary to the rest. It’s the affection Jon craves—the way a kiss changes from brushes of lips, into something deeper, how fingers dip between the swells of ribs, his hair being gently gathered into a fist and held back from his face. The embrace of a body against Jon’s own, feet intertwined, breath on the back of his neck—the heavy, sweaty collapse afterward. Martin’s quite good at that part, always has the decency to sprawl over or around Jon like his own personal weighted blanket.

Right now it all feels blessedly simple. “I do want to, but— I know it’s been a, ah, a  _ day, _ and if you’re too tired I completely—”

Martin surges against him, his hands bracketing over Jon’s ears, pulling their mouths together, and Jon doesn’t remember what it was he was saying or if it mattered all that much anyways. He kisses Martin back with the frenzied determination of a person taking what they can get and holding on to what they can in a race to keep ahead of the violence that would rip them apart. He’s already pulling at Martin’s clothes, not even trying to remove them properly, that would require dexterity from a part of Jon’s brain that hasn’t caught up with the rest of him yet. He’s just tugging and stitches are giving, and Martin is trying to get closer but there’s the bench in the way. 

Martin keeps bearing him back, and Jon’s arse nearly falls into the sink. A hand reaches blindly behind Jon to steady them and only succeeds in knocking everything off the bench. The astringent smell of antibacterial hits the air, meaning probably the pump came open and dumped its contents onto the floor, which is  _ stupid  _ of them. Wasteful. They might need that.

Jon doesn’t care.

His shoulders slam back against the empty wall, narrowly missing that bit of shattered mirror, but the change in posture enables Jon to hook his legs over Martin’s hips. One hand fumbles between them and Jon presses his fingers against the front of Martin’s pants, feels him hot and twitching in the palm of his hand. Martin forgets to keep kissing Jon, mouth falling open on a stutter of vowels, and Jon takes those from him as well—keeps their foreheads pressed tightly together and breathes in those perfect sounds.

“W—we can’t here,” Martin murmurs.

“Why not,” Jon asks, voice hoarse with it, but still so much steadier than the erratic tumble of his heart where it beats against mangled ribs. Their chests are heaving into each other, their shirts have ridden up, and the shock of skin against skin makes Jon’s throat feel tight, makes his eyes sting. He’s become so accustomed to the overcrowding in his mind, that sometimes the stranger thing is looking down at his own hands and remembering they’re a part of him. The longer he stays touching Martin, the clearer the connection becomes. 

“All right?” Martin asks, pushing Jon’s hair out of his face and stilling himself. “We can just lie down together, whatever you feel like,” his thumb smooths over Jon’s eyebrow, tender and familiar, and existing at such odds with the home of his youth that deprived him of anything resembling affection. 

“It’s just so loud,” Jon tries to explain, “I’m always everywhere, and everything  _ feels _ -” his eyes clench shut as Jon struggles to stay in this one moment, and not lose himself in a thousand others. “I want to be  _ here _ .”

Martin’s expression goes sad and angry and worried all at once, then that quietly unyielding spine of tenacity takes hold. “I’ll do my best,” he announces, jaw set with determination. Jon has a moment to let out a small laugh, because it’s  _ sweet  _ and it’s a little  _ funny  _ considering what he means by it—but then Martin’s mouth is on his, the kisses turning messy and beautifully overwhelming and Jon’s hands are all over him again.

Martin makes a helpless noise when Jon arches up into him—a noise Jon has heard before but still can’t understand how it could be directed at him, or how Martin could want him to the point of desperation. It never ever made sense to Jon, but now he isn’t sure how he ever lived without it. The power of the Beholding is a hollow burden, a constant grinding headache that holds no true value. But to be able to do this to Martin—to alter his breath and his blood, to latch on to him in some frantic grab for comfort before it can be noticed and stolen away—that’s real. This love is the last precious spark of humanity left that Jon owns, and it’s enough.

Martin groans in frustration the more Jon squirms underneath him. Without warning, Jon experiences a wave of disequilibrium as he goes from pinned underneath Martin, to picked upright. He’s staring into big, grey eyes, Martin’s hair is sticking up all over— he has that perpetually bashful look about him. 

Jon sighs. “It’s not impressive when the person you’re carrying is only—

Then Martin is blurting out, “I’m not fucking you on a sink,” which isn’t bashful at all, despite the heat blooming across Martin’s cheeks, and rather steals the breath out of Jon. 

He manages a small, “W—o—okay,” and adjusts his hold around Martin’s neck to support more of his own weight. It’s better like this anyway, Martin has to do all the navigating and Jon is free to do whatever he likes. Martin’s ears are very sensitive and Jon’s mouth is  _ right there,  _ of course he’s going to scrape his teeth against one cold lobe, and it’s all worth it when Martin stumbles and almost drops him on top of a broken recliner chair.

Martin safely deposits Jon back on his feet once they’ve made it into the bedroom, and Jon immediately bullies Martin back up against the door, sinks to his knees, fingers hooking into the waist of his pants and dragging them down.

“Wait, I’m supposed to be making you—” Martin starts, only to have it cut off into a shrill  _ huhh _ of an exhale when Jon slips the head past his lips and begins to suck. He feels Martin’s fingers scrabbling over his shoulders in surprise, before settling and brushing into the hair at the nape of Jon’s neck, pulling it away from his face. “Okay,” Martin says airily, his head thunking back against the door.

Jon’s free hand charts the swell of Martin’s hip, nails scraping against his flanks, and Jon thrills at full body tremor Martin can’t seem to suppress when he flattens his tongue to lick at the fraenulum. Jon’s own arousal is tertiary to all of it; a low, insistent fever that Martin will draw from him later. Martin moans as Jon finds a steady rhythm. The sloppy, wet sounds of his mouth on Martin, contrasting the tight, choked off noises falling from Martin’s lips.

Fingers tighten in Jon’s hair, “Jon, I—” Martin’s voice nothing but a strained breath of air, and Jon knows, but isn’t worried. Martin’s thighs begin to quiver, his fingers crook, flex, spasming wildly in Jon’s hair, over his shoulders, against his cheek, like Martin can’t quite decide on a place for them to land when there are so many options. Jon lets him thrust a bit between his lips, expecting it. “I’m going to—,” Martin pants, unable to articulate. Martin’s head thumps back loudly against the door again, when Jon turns his eyes up, he can see Martin’s teeth dug into his bottom lip, eyes shut tight.

Jon takes as much of Martin into his mouth as possible, feels his cock grow thicker, firmer against his tongue. Hears Martin’s ragged inhale as he holds it. His body goes rigid, every part of him is still aside from the fingernails scraping frenetically against the shape of Jon’s skull, holding him there.

Martin abruptly turns his mouth into his own shoulder, cries out against it, and then he’s coming in Jon’s mouth. There’s the pulse of bitterness across his tongue, and Jon swallows it away thoughtlessly, opens his eyes to watch Martin shiver and gasp for air. His cheeks stain dark, valentine crimson, so alive and burning and Jon’s.

Martin takes one last deep breath, then hauls Jon up and in by the shirt, mashes their lips together messily, then jabs a finger at the center of Jon’s chest.

“You are putting,” he says, voice still thick, “ _ a lot  _ of faith in my refractory.”

“I believe in you,” Jon says, smiles, and rubs his nose against the stubble under Martin’s jaw. 

Martin rolls his eyes, takes one last deep breath, and then tackles Jon down onto the bed.

Within minutes they’re stripped down, kissing messily, the springs groan alarmingly as Jon rolls and pulls Martin down on top of him. Martin is hard again, pushing them together—Jon with handfuls of Martin’s arse, Martin with his teeth dug into Jon’s shoulder, his tongue soothing away the sting left behind. A slick thumb slips down between them, then gradually inside, and Jon gasps— capillaries swelling with blood and alighting his face, over his chest. Martin’s knuckles stroke over the crest of Jon’s hipbone, down to the crease of his leg. He presses Jon’s thigh out and up toward his body. Another finger sinks inside him.

“You can— come on,” Jon pants, tries rutting up against Martin’s stomach, but Martin pushes him back down and consumes his mouth, ignoring Jon’s token complaints, barely letting him breathe. It makes Jon go blissfully light-headed, buzzing at the edges, makes him act out deliberately so Martin works harder to anchor him. The fingers inside Jon are still slow, skirting the threshold of rough without ever tipping over into it. Even the incremental way in which Jon’s cock pushes against the soft skin of Martin’s belly is enough to make him feel like his body is shorting out, hurtling toward a release he isn’t quite ready for, but wants nonetheless.

He needs this, Jon thinks, he doesn’t always, but right now it’s exactly what he wants. He feels pushed to capacity, like a bomb inside of a person inside of a bomb, constantly one moment from total ignition. And he needs to touch Martin. Needs more than what he’s getting. Needs to be made to feel anything else.

“Martin I—” Jon starts to threaten, but is cut off by kisses. “J-Jesus—” even more kisses. “Fuck—”

Jon tries to get a hand between them to stroke himself off, but both of Jon’s wrists are gathered up in an instant, and pinned over his head. The stretch of it pulls Jon into a small arch, his head automatically tipping up, mouth open and panting. Martin blinks down at him, chewing his bottom lip for a moment, and Jon can see him debating whether or not to let go. Without the fullness of Martin’s fingers inside him, and with the way he’s using the weight of his body to keep Jon still—the tension crawls reluctantly back to a dull pulse at the base of Jon’s spine. 

“That was close,” Martin breathes out, his grip loosening as he leans down to open his mouth against Jon’s throat, his cock sliding against Jon’s thighs, over his belly.

“Isn’t that the—the-” the words in Jon’s head stop putting themselves together. Martin’s position between his legs falters and he catches at Jon’s rim, just barely, the tip pressing slickly inside. Martin stays there, trembling—but then the pressure is gone and Martin goes back to working Jon over with those maddening  _ not-quite-enough _ touches.

It goes on like that for ages—Martin’s fingers twisting inside of him, the furious heat of his skin providing little stabs of friction that bring Jon skittering close to the edge, before retreating back again. Once, with Martin’s mouth on his cock—Jon feels the Archive begin to slip away. Not completely, of course, that’s not possible anymore, but the way it used to be when there was still a distinction to be made.

Jon’s hands grasp into Martin’s hair, hips trying to pump up against Martin’s arm pinning him down across the torso, and he feels it there, just for a flash— the quiet of his own mind. It flickers out so quickly that Jon thinks maybe he was wrong. The frustration of this, coupled with the very different frustration of a physical body coming alive at every frayed nerve, causes the next exhale to come out brittle and sob-like.

This has Martin up in an instant, eyes dazed and a touch panicked as they run a mute inventory over Jon’s body. He’s pushing errant strands of hair away from Jon’s forehead. Light fingers stroke over Jon’s scars, down his throat, touching every visible mark left there by forces beyond his control, and Jon can see Martin hating every last one of them. Hating every piece of brutal evidence that eroded Jon’s agency, bit by bit, until something unfamiliar was left standing in his place. 

Martin doesn’t see him like that. Of course he doesn’t. He believes in Jon so much that it hurts, and god, isn’t that something: Wanting so very much not to disappoint Martin—an impulse that has kept Jon from hurting many people.

Still, it gets so heavy, carrying around the remains of an old, decaying self. 

Jon locks his arms around Martin’s shoulders. “Give me—” he tries, frustrated and not knowing what he’s demanding. All of it? Yes. That. “Fuck. Um,  _ you. _ ” 

“Jon,” Martin says, and, “Jon,” he pants against Jon’s lips as he reaches down and takes himself in hand, begins guiding himself into Jon’s body. Steadily, Martin eases in, his hand coming back up to stabilise himself against the sheets. Jon can feel the fabric sliding away from underneath his shoulder blade as Martin curls it into his fist. He’s not going to stop and start over again this time, Jon is certain of that. Martin needs this too, needs the closeness, needs to feel helpful, needs to pour out all his own longings and silences.

With Martin’s body flattened against his own, Jon can feel the heat pouring off his skin. He trembles, trying to hold back from pushing too deep, too fast, the way his body dictates he must do. Martin tries pushing his face into the crook of Jon’s throat to muffle himself, but Jon panics and jerks him back up by the hair. Martin hisses, lips pulling back from his teeth, but Jon has his eyes again. He needs to see Martin’s face. It’s too hard for Jon to recognise himself anymore, but Martin always recognises him and that’s enough to make Jon _belong_ —both to Martin, and in this space— if only tangentially his own.

Martin’s hips jerk forward. His eyes fall closed and small, defenceless sounds eek out from behind his teeth. Jon’s hand tightens in his hair, makes sure Martin doesn’t try quieting himself again. 

It’s probably too hard. Probably annoys him.

Jon tugs again, and  _ there— _ there he is. Martin capitulates and opens his eyes, gives Jon a look equal parts wrecked and exasperated, and says, “You think that’s going to work?”

“Yes.”

“You’re right,” Martin agrees, and his hips surge forward, press hard into the soft skin at the insides of Jon’s thighs as he pushes himself deep and stays. It’s a lot to take at once, just on the right side of too much, and exactly what Jon wants. It pulls a shocked, breathless sound from Jon’s throat as his hands scrabble to cling to Martin’s shoulders, blunt nails leaving half-moons where they dig into his skin.

They stay this way for a moment, kissing at first, absorbed in each other—but soon kissing turns into sensation drunk smears of lips, turns into heavy breathing as need wears away at them both. Below, Martin has begun to move inside Jon, each thrust slow and careful and conflicting with the needy way Jon is already squirming beneath him, trying to push down into it. If Martin is aware of Jon urging him on, he doesn’t heed it—keeps at a depth and angle that always makes Jon break out into shivers as pressure waves surge through his body. He feels suspended in that moment of heady anticipation, marched to the precipice of bliss and held there.

“More _ , _ ” Jon manages, “H-harder,” and Martin relents for the span of three whole seconds—enough for one heavy thrust into Jon, pushes him up the mattress, before retreating back into the shallow penetration of a moment ago—massages up and over the place inside Jon that makes him feel like he’s coming apart in slow motion. Martin’s head tips low to the center of Jon’s chest. With a lurch of hot, sharp gravity in his belly, Jon realises his gaze is turned to where they’re joined together—watching himself give, and Jon take, how their bodies slot together in a way that isn’t everything. Martin maps out the limits of Jon’s borders, and Jon feels finite again. 

_ “Martin,”  _ Jon’s voice sounds shrill to his own ears, taut with all this need and desire, all this feeling that’s finally happening  _ with  _ Jon, and not  _ to  _ him the way it’ll feel minutes from now when Martin falls asleep and the world floods back in _. _

This seems to break Martin from his reverie. A forearm braces alongside Jon’s ear, his hand cupping over the top of Jon’s head to keep him from sliding away, and then there is a new strength coiling into his thrusts. It has Jon gulping down air and cursing out loud, his own arms banding tightly around Martin’s chest to hook needy fingers into the shifting muscle of his back and shoulders. Once again, Martin has tucked himself against Jon’s throat and Jon can feel the way each moan issues vibrations that echo underneath Jon’s skin, steals into his blood and bones and resonates there.

It’s a perfect, messy, almost claustrophobic embrace. Jon’s cock rubs wetly against Martin’s belly on each thrust, the insides of his thighs ache and tremble where they’re stretched to accommodate Martin’s larger frame. Martin tries pushing up on his hands to get more leverage, but Jon can’t let that happen right now, and pulls Martin back down—wants to be fucked  _ this  _ way, where the edges of their bodies burn and sweat and grind together, where it matters less and less all these arbitrary lines of demarcation between them.

“Look at me,” Jon says, sanding paper rough, demanding, and something in the tone—or perhaps Martin simply doesn’t want his roots torn out again—has him jerking to attention. His eyes fix on Jon, wide and silvered and fever-bright, that relentless defiance burning away behind them. “You’re beautiful,” is all Jon can think to say—hackneyed, inadequate really, he’s so much more than that—still the truth. 

Martin lets out a small, overwhelmed sound and kisses Jon before their movement displaces the alignment of their mouths. His rhythm begins to take on an frenetic edge, becomes rougher, more rapid as he pushes Jon once again to the sticking point. The world within Jon begins to shutter to a halt, narrows to this one point of light—this great weight that tethers Martin inextricably into the material of what is left of a human soul, and hangs there within reach, always white hot to the touch. It’s that, more than anything, feeling loved and peaceful and whole, that makes Jon arch into Martin, back bowing off the mattress as Jon sucks in a breath and holds it. Martin senses it as well and sinks himself into Jon in short, tight movements, keeps the friction centralised and constant.

(Once, when Jon was in uni, he’d made the mistake of touching a frayed wire on the electric radiator, and the jolt he received seemed to arc all the way down and back up his body. Hours later, he could still feel the shock of it rattling along his nerve endings.)

_ This _ feels nothing like that, but it’s the best thing Jon can think to compare it to.

When the plunge happens, it feels a bit like a small explosion has taken somewhere deep within Jon’s body. Intense frissons of pleasure flood into Jon all at once—shock waves that radiate with an intensity that makes his toes curl where they’re pressing into Martin’s backside— his muscles spasm, then go taut, unable to settle on a single reaction. There aren’t words, Jon has lost them all, but there are plenty of sounds coming from him, sounds that get swallowed into kisses as heat and slick pulses between their bellies. Martin groans sympathetically, twinging hard, faltering a little, as Jon contracts around him. Even as Jon thinks he might be completely rung, his head thick with the silence that comes from a mind emptying of higher thought to make room for what feels good, Martin will do something with his hips that makes Jon gasp and shudder apart just a little bit more.

It’s with those dimmer aftershocks that some part of Jon’s brain prompts him to consider the way Martin’s breath heaves in through his nose, and shakily out of his mouth. He’s trying very hard to give Jon a moment it seems, holding as still as he can, even as the rest of him clearly opposes this. Jon is still too addled, coming down from an endorphin high to do much in the way of vocal encouragement. Instead he smears a kiss against Martin’s jaw, stubble burning against swollen lips, moves his hand over the occipital of Martin’s head, gets a fistful of dark, sweat-tipped hair.

“Oh god, not ag—” 

Jon yanks.

_ “Shit,”  _ Martin squeaks out, then in one fluid movement, presses one of Jon’s knees up to his chest, gets a hand on his arse, and within moments he’s throbbing and disjointed and unspooling. Jon is so busy admiring the dark stain of flush across Martin’s cheekbones, that when he feels Martin starting to come, it actually shocks him a bit. The sensation shouldn’t be unexpected, it isn’t  _ new  _ by any means, but it wrings out one last sympathetic thrill from Jon’s body when everything grows a little wetter—when Martin lets go of biting his own bottom lip and pants out tight, little  _ ah, ah, ah’s  _ into Jon’s ear. God. It’s easily one of Jon’s favourite noises in the world—vulnerable and sweet, devastatingly transparent.

Slowly, Martin starts to pull out, not quite flaccid yet—can’t seem to resist a last, shaky thrust even though it has him gasping in sensitivity and really making a mess of them both. Jon is still trying to catch his own breath, blinking stupidly up at the ceiling and occasionally huffing a delirious sort of laugh. Martin returns with a flannel and does mediocre work of cleaning them before flopping heavily onto his back. They’re pooled to their own sides of the mattress, just the tips of their fingers touching, sweat cooling, the air humid and thick from what they’ve just done with each other. 

“Was that—” Martin starts, takes another deep breath to try and restore any brain cells deprived of oxygen, “Do you feel better? You look—god—it wasn’t too much was it? Was that all right? ”

With great effort Jon turns his head on the pillow to stare at Martin. His hair falls limply across his forehead, wisps of it turned wavy and wild from damp. He slurs, one sarcasm tinged word at a time, “You’ve got to be  _ fucking  _ joking.”

Martin beams a proud smile, and crosses over into Jon’s space, nuzzles down onto his chest and gives a contented sigh as Jon threads their fingers together.

“We should probably get dressed in case we need to run,” Martin says when their breathing is even again and the only sounds are creaks and static and the screams that travel on the wind. “Probably sent out a beacon of  _ These People Are Having Too Much Fun  _ and any minute we’ll have monsters beating down the doors.”

Jon hums noncommittally. He doesn’t want Martin moving away from him, doesn’t want to open the space so that the Fear can come pouring through again in an open channel. He’ll kill anything that gets too close to Martin while he rests, would go into Martin’s dreams if he could and rip apart the nightmares. 

“Martin—” Jon murmurs after a time, “suppose we get through this. I mean, theoretically of course. We’re all probably going to die horribly. But suppose we… we get the world back, and...well, everything back.” By  _ everything  _ Jon means the rest of his humanity, but neither one of them are prepared for that conversation right now. Perhaps not ever.

“Right, I’m supposing.”

“What would you want to do?”

“Oh,” Martin says, sounding baffled by it. “I actually, um, well I haven’t given it much thought. Find another job obviously. With my mum gone and nothing magically keeping me anywhere—try a few online classes? See how that goes. Or, you know, just keep lying on my CV and see if I can get in at Whitehall next.”

Jon laughs, “They should be so lucky. I’ve always wanted to date a minister.”

“That sounds… not true,” Martin laughs.

“I’d make an exception for you of course.”

“Too kind,” Martin breathes out, giving a reproachful nip against Jon’s ribs. Another silence lapses between then, and Jon thinks Martin must finally be drifting off, but then he asks, “What about you? If we get our lives back, what would you want to do?” 

“Don’t know either,” Jon admits. “Haven’t thought that far ahead,” he feels like his future has been stolen from him in every sense, but it’s nice, sometimes, thinking about who he might have been. Could still possibly become. “I want us to be together. That’s all.”

Martin brushes the skin over Jon’s hip bone, lets out an easy laugh. “Right, well. Let’s flesh this out: Me, the illegitimate minister of—um—transport, or whatever—and you, my mysterious partner who only comes round for fancy banquets, says  _ Winston Churchill was actually big old anti-union racist,  _ before they’ve even passed out the hors d'oeuvres —”

“Which is  _ right,  _ by the way.”

“Which is right,” Martin agrees, “and then, I suppose.. House in Sussex? Manicured hedges, a neighbor we despise, two and half kids and a dog.”

“What’s the dog's name?”

“Jiii...mmh. Jim...othy.”

“Terrible. And the children?”

“We give them roman numerals and be done with it.”

“We sound like lovely parents,” Jon says, smiling to himself and running his fingers through the soft baby hairs at the nape of Martin’s neck. “Is that—” he says, “is that something you think you’d want?”

“What?” Martin asks, “ _ children?” _

“Well not  _ just—” _

“I don’t think I’d be any good at that. It’s the kind of thing you want to be sure of, right?” Martin says hastily, insecurity creeping into his words. “If I go all wrong—probably best that ends with me.”

This makes every inch of Jon ache. “You wouldn’t. You’re  _ nothing  _ like— Martin you’re brilliant, and that’s impossible.”

“She probably thought the same thing at first.”

The worst part about it, is that Martin is right. Jon Knows it. Martin’s mother started off as most parents do: Looking down at their newborn baby and swearing they would never let any harm come to them. 

Jon presses his nose against the top of Martin’s head and breathes in all the earthy goodness of him. “Maybe start with the house and the dog first?” Start with the belonging, Jon means, in all the ways they can manage. Funny thing about the world ending—it tends to clarify things that never seemed to have a solution because you were scrupulous instead of bold, or analysed too much, or committed too little.

Martin leans up, gently smooths a thumb over Jon’s eyebrow and presses a kiss to his lips, before settling down again. “I’d like that,” he says quietly, and Jon can hear the smile in his voice.

Slowly, Jon curls his little finger over Martin’s ring finger, holds it there like promise.

  
  


——

  
  


Everything goes wrong. And then it goes spectacularly wrong.

It happens all in a blur, whether in actuality or the shock makes the memory stitch together afterward with imprecision. Jon can only assume that the creatures and avatars left in this world are growing  _ just _ clever enough to surprise him.

Jon could See the Dark coming up ahead, knew they would need to ford their way through it rather than around it as they’d done before with smaller croppings. This particular slur of Pitch had infected the warped topography of what was once the Kielder Forest—and while there can not be complete darkness, for the Eye imposes its dreadful scrutiny in all corners, even the darkest ones, Jon was very firm that it would take constant vigilance to make it through safely. 

He had made Martin let go of his hand. 

“I need to See.” Jon had told him that. He needed to search ahead, needed to feel the power of the Eye, rather than the grounding force of his anchor, and he had Martin  _ let go of his hand.  _

An indeterminate amount of time later they are weaving through the thick of twisted conifers whose branches stretch now in unnaturally grasping fingers. They’re careful to toe around the shadows these branches cast down upon the ground, they do not  _ move  _ quite right—furling and unfurling like hundreds of crepuscular, clenching fists. Jon can feel one test its strength, the shadow whipping out across the forest floor and snatching underneath Martin’s boot. Jon turns around just in time to catch him by the elbow as he trips. Daisy’s hunting knife falls from his hand with a dull thud onto the blanket of decaying leaves, a few pieces of detritus not properly secured in exterior pockets tumbling to join it as well.

Jon breathes out slowly, the surge of anxiety leaving him with unpleasant jitters under his skin. “All right?”

“Yeah,” Martin says, shaking himself out a bit, his eyes travelling toward the nearest yew. “Getting bullied by shadows now, bit  _ primary  _ don’t you think,” he says, loud and accusatory, to the forest. 

Jon huffs a laugh, lets his hand slide away from Martin’s elbow, he turns around.

The only warning he receives, aside from the cold feeling of dread that radiates in the center of his mind before he is about to Know something, is Martin suddenly shouting, “Jon wait—!”

Then everything happens all at once.

The shadows converge, thousands and thousands criss-crossing madly with each other, as if the entire forest has been biding its time, waiting for one singular moment of distraction in which to strike out. They wrap around Jon, overlapping, obscuring, choking him to the brink of death over and over, Jon’s body furiously repairs itself before having to start all over again. Darkness crosses over his eyes. It is not the same obstruction of a blindfold, it does not focus Jon’s sight to all the otherness ahead and behind, this is the true Night—ancient, and empty, refusing definition as it crawls down the back of Jon’s throat. Behind his eyes. Into the hollow of his lungs.

Jon can feel the presence of the Eye—but it doesn’t seem like it is  _ with  _ him, as much as it is  _ watching  _ him, it’s detached in a way Jon hasn’t felt in over a year. He can’t find the place within himself in which to channel power, the connection is being obfuscated, blocked out by the Dark coiling itself through him, and Jon might not be able to See right now, but he knows it intends to tear him apart.

But then, bit by bit, the Dark begins to peel away. 

It isn’t Jon doing it involuntarily, he knows that, because he knows exactly how it  _ feels  _ when he turns his Gaze against a thing and begins to shred it apart with the certainty of its own wretched existence. 

He feels himself falling to the ground, the air leaving his lungs in a hard push. Jon only knows that Dark must be in retreat because he can feel the prickling texture of spruce needles, and damp, spongy moss underhand, rather than the great blanket of Pitch numbing him to all the things that were once grown by the light. As Jon opens his eyes, he can see shadows dragging themselves away from him in ragged tatters that bear no resemblance to their strong arms of earlier. Some shudder, break into smaller, more pathetic pieces, and sink into the ground, disappearing from sight.

_ Martin,  _ Jon thinks, shakily pushing up to his hands and knees, already desperate to wrench up the power of the Archivist.

Martin is standing—no. No, that’s not..that’s not right. 

Martin is still standing in exactly the place Jon last saw him, but gone is the slight stoop in his posture, and the soft upturn of his lips, and gone is the gentle grey-blue of his eyes. His feet are planted firmly against the earth, his hands are clenched by his sides, lips pulled back from his teeth in a grimace of effort, an all too familiar acidic green glow lights his eyes—and at once Jon recognises what shattered the Dark. 

With a sick feeling building in the pit of Jon’s stomach, he watches a drop of blood trickle from Martin’s nose.

Terror finally breaks through the shock. “It’s killing him!” Jon shouts up at the sky because he doesn’t know where else to scream, “Stop it! Stop it now, can’t you see it’s killing him!” Jon can hear the shadows screaming in agony—not in an actual tongue because the Dark does not possess such a thing—but in a wailing din that threads into the swelling of the wind itself. 

He scrambles to his feet, runs to Martin and begins shaking him, but Martin seems to be in a trance that he can not stem. “Martin?  _ Martin _ , Martin come on, please—” Jon says, and he thinks he might be crying. “Don’t— please just—” and then Jon switches back over into anger, once again cursing at the Eye, because he  _ knows— _ has always known— it’s preoccupation with Martin. It’s frustration that Martin would never fully allow the Beholding to supplant his humanity, and the jealousy at thought of him allowing it from any other source. And seeing as how the only way to manipulate Martin is with his full understanding and consent, the Watcher saw an opportunity, knowing Martin would allow anything if it meant saving Jon. Perhaps it even kept Jon from Knowing the Dark’s machinations so this precise scenario could take place and the Eye could drive in its mark just. a bit. more. 

“Martin,” Jon tries again, his hands on either side of Martin’s face, “Martin, listen to my voice. This is going to kill you—or—or make you into something you don’t want. You have to stop.”

“I  _ can’t,”  _ Martin grits out between his teeth, the blood from his nose running into the lines of tense concentration around his mouth, “it won’t let me.”

“No, it only wants you to think that—it’s  _ your  _ choice. Just—just calm down, and—and look! I’m  _ fine,  _ we’re safe now, and you don’t have to keep Seeing anymore. Just close your eyes, Martin. Listen to me.”

Slowly, haltingly, Martin shuts his eyes.

Jon can barely hold on when Martin pitches forward, manages to push him back and prop him up against a boulder overgrown with swans-neck moss. He sinks down, unconscious, head lolling, blood streaked down his chin. Jon can only manage to pet over him at first, dampens the tail of his button up and cleans Martin’s face. Then, with more fear than the moment he knew Peter Lukas was leading Martin away into a place he would never return from, Jon  _ Looks _ inside Martin. He has to be sure. He has to know it wasn’t too late.

The mark of the Eye is much deeper than it was before, scorched into Martin like a brand not yet cooled from the irons, but it couldn’t reach him. Not completely. But it’s the  _ almost  _ that has Jon pacing and chewing his nails, grateful that Martin can’t hear the way his breath comes out in ragged hiccoughs as the worry and relief chew their way through his chest. 

A small spider skitters over the top of Martin’s hand, pauses on the patch of moss next to Martin’s thumb. 

“Do you  _ ever  _ fuck off,” Jon says wearily, and to his amazement, the thing actually fucks off.

Martin is still out, his body jerking with the nightmares Jon knows to be dwelling there. Jon busies himself with setting a camp, tries building the tent only to have it collapse—relents his fury at the Eye long enough to  _ Know  _ how to set up the damn tent. The fire he builds is weak, is mostly down to smoking embers by the time Martin begins stirring.

“God,” Martin groans, his legs shifting from their idle sprawl, “my head..”

“All right?” Jon asks, moving toward him. “I wouldn’t try standing up if I were you.”

“Feels like I’ve been run down by a lorry,” he says, massaging his temples. “Did we—is it—gone? The Dark, I mean.”

“I  _ quite _ think you took care of that.”

“Oh..” Martin says, colour rising in his cheeks, “er.. Good I suppose. Okay. Well. And you’re not hurt are you? I didn’t know what else to—god, Jon, it looked like it was going to kill you.”

Jon snaps—the anxiety searing along each nerve ending, refusing to give Jon the grace of forethought or tact. “What were you thinking!”

“Jon I—”

“Were you even? That was  _ stupid  _ Martin, stupid to risk yourself like that.” Martin looks up from the ground, his mouth pressed into a thin line, but Jon is  _ angry,  _ or he’s  _ scared,  _ and it’s all the same anymore. “The world isn’t going to be left any worse for my not being it, but  _ you— _ can you even comprehend how priceless your humanity is? You take it for granted and think you’ll always be able to come back from these places the Entities take you, but it doesn’t work like that! Every time a piece of you gets chipped away. I can’t be responsible for creating another monster, I  _ can’t.  _ Don’t you think I have enough guilt over destroying the whole goddamn world, without destroying you as well? Isn’t this enough!” Jon flings his arms wide, gesturing to the broken earth around them. He feels compulsion gathering in his voice. “Haven’t I done enough? I should have known better. I should never have let it get this far. You should have ki—why didn’t you just let me d—”

“You know why,” Martin cuts him off, voice stern and flat, severing the compulsion himself with a crack that echoes in Jon’s skull, and steals away all his anger and misery all at once.

When the fire has been stoked again and the glow from the flames lick against the thin walls of the tent, when Martin has started speaking to him again, Jon climbs into Martin’s lap. 

Jon used to be able to sustain the grudge after a row for days, either unable to admit he was wrong, or refusing to accept an apology himself. He doesn’t know why it used to be that way. Trust issues, Georgie told him once, a lack of validation at a critical stage of emotional development. “ _ No one has ever apologised to you properly, have they,”  _ she said in that piercingly analytical tone that used to drive Jon mad.  _ “Is that why you’re always so defensive? Is it because you feel like—deep down—everything is always your fault?”  _ And for a moment, Jon hated her, because unlike him, Georgie wasn’t afraid of the truth. That was the night they broke up: He’d told her one course in abnormal psychology didn’t make her a therapist, and she told him they needed space—and space turned into silence. Silence turned into boxes packed neatly with his things, and Jon had felt a sick twist of gratification, as if Georgie’s rejection of him was proof that Jon was  _ too much  _ of something, and  _ not enough  _ of another. It was proof that he was better off alone.

All these years later, and Jon finally thinks he’s beginning to understand what she meant. It doesn’t do to live behind walls, to shut yourself off in front of people, force them to watch you suffer, then issue recriminations when they try and stop it happening. Jon should have known better, because it was what had been done to him. 

Time has not always been a kind teacher for Jon, but in this case, it’s not so terrible. He’s still capable of learning lessons.

Jon hopes this is him growing, becoming softer, hopes this is how he keeps the human inside him alive. Despite all that he’s done, Georgie might be proud of him for at least that. 

“I’m sorry,” Jon murmurs into Martin’s neck. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean any of it.” 

“Sh,” Martin quiets him, his hands rubbing comforting circles over Jon’s back. “I know. You weren’t all wrong. I felt—it felt. God, Jon, I’m sorry too, I had no idea.”

Jon kisses Martin, and kisses him, presses himself frantically to Martin—doesn’t know what else to do, wants to be as close as possible, and is feeling now more than ever all those bitter degrees of separation between two bodies, and how there is no way to ever completely close them. How unfair it is that people are built searching and yearning for some sense of wholeness, and even as they find something or someone they can not bear to lose, they must also accept how truly easy it is to prise those pieces apart.

But for now, there’s Martin’s teeth against Jon’s pulse—their chests pressed together—Jon’s trousers caught around one foot, his ankles locked over Martin’s hips. The loud slide of the sleeping pack’s nylon shell under Jon’s shoulders.

The restless, vicious need for more than just an anchor pounding in Jon’s chest as Martin rolls them, and tugs Jon back onto his lap—braces his arm around Jon’s spine, a thumb tracing Jon’s bottom lip. The tenderness in Martin’s eyes burns, is antithetical in every way to the suffering that the Archivist craves, contrasts the lines between what is Jon and what is  _ more _ than Jon. 

“God, you have no idea how you feel,” Martin whispers against Jon’s jaw. He smooths back the hair from where it’s fallen into Jon’s face, tucks it back behind his ears, kisses him on the forehead, defines each flimsy border with such simple gestures. It feels safe, makes Jon feel protected and loved and cherished, like what is outside can not touch him with its wickedness. 

Jon rolls up and back down, hard, feels Martin’s fingertips digging into his hips, feels Martin twitch inside of him when Jon scrapes his teeth against the lobe of his ear. Little more than that, and Martin’s breath hisses with an inhale, he twists Jon back down to the sleeping mat, pinning him down, hips snapping. “Fuck, Jon,” he grits out softly, defencelessly—as if it is  _ Jon  _ who is the tether, and Martin is the kite, and not the other way around. Jon has never thought of it that way, thought the distinction was clear and that is why Martin carried his love with such heaviness—but that’s not it, is it? Some people love in great boulders—tremendous and unflinching— and others in delicate wisps of string that coils and binds and keeps—but in the end, it is all the same persistent love.

Martin comes first, spilling inside Jon with a gasp, his left shoulder curling into Jon’s right, his quiet whimpers shattering through the sound of blood pounding in Jon’s ear with each pulse. Before Jon can even think to take himself in hand, Martin is there, doing it for him.  The moment encompasses everything, and without the fear and anger of before strangling him, John can feel everything like new lungs exposed to fresh air. It’s shocking and raw, and the steady throb of Martin’s heart singing against Jon’s ribcage becomes the only point of solace in the world. The tips of Martin’s fingers, roughened from weeks of clawing their way through an impossible world, work Jon eagerly. When Jon shuts his eyes and it feels like a respite.

Martin lets go and pushes himself down Jon’s body, his hair sending bright tickles against the thin skin over a hip, before his mouth is on Jon. The tension blooms and it’s all heat, and yearning, and the wet sounds of Martin sucking him, and all the simplicity and thoughtlessness of satisfying an urge that only makes sense half the time. Jon wants and wants and wants, wants selfishly and righteously, and wants it all.

Afterward, when Martin has wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and Jon has given him the last bottle of water from their supplies—Martin curls around Jon, holds him in the warm hollow of his body and tucks Jon’s head under his chin. 

“I’m tired,” Jon whispers when he feels Martin beginning to doze and isn’t ready yet for that cavity between his mind and his presence to reopen. “I don’t want to be this anymore.”

Martin’s arms tighten around him. “We could...” he draws his palm down over Jon’s eyes in an implication. Makes Jon remember the hysteria he felt that night he broke into Martin’s office—seems forever ago now—asking Martin if he cared to join him in a spot of self-mutilation and elopement. Course he was half starved to death, existing off old statements and litres Lucozade. See to it that Martin would parse the somewhat subconscious ulterior motive. It had sounded so much more romantic when he practised it in his head. 

Jon sighs, wistful and wishing. “We can’t. Not yet.” 

Martin hums, strokes his thumb over the top of Jon’s wrist, gently inches the bottom of his jumper out of the way and fits his fingers against bare skin. “Forward then,” he murmurs.

“Forward,” Jon repeats. He can give Martin this, give Martin the one thing more fragile than life itself: Hope—the beating, irrational, heart of it. 

Jon doesn’t even try to shut it out when, bit by bit, the world reopens inside his mind. He can remember what matters, in this always fleeting instant, is that Martin is here, and Jon is here, and for one stolen moment Jon forgets the fear in the back of his mind that they might be running out of time. Outside, the colour of the sky is a flat bruise, the wind howls and howls, extinguishes the fire—but the darkness is afraid of them now and the shadows will find no purchase here.


End file.
